Environmental concern, the financial concern, which is a lot of individuals in oakland. It is this in the feeling of sadness when you see wasted food. There is something within us that we cannot name, and it is difficult to talk about. That is something we are trying to tap him as well. We have different angles. Thealk about how 25 of freshwater used in Food Production goes to food we never eat. We talk about how one in six people in Alameda County do not know where the next meal is going to come from. The majority are children or Senior Citizens. We talk about the financial implications that up to 2200 a year for the average consumer and what they are spending on food they never eat. We do a lot of different levels. I think the Biggest Issue is it is coalition building, working together. We need macro and micro change. In the trenches, we need more food recovery programs. We need people working on gleaming programs. We need to figure out different ways that in everyday practice we get food from what would be the trashcan and into peoples bellies. We also need macro change. We talk about policy changes. We need to evaluate the way food recovery operates. The other issue we are finding is that, for example, San Francisco food runners is an amazing program. 200 volunteers. They moved 15 tons of food a week. They are just making a dent in the food that goes to waste in this city. Art of the issue is, they are going for foundation funding. They are in the meyer a lot of us in the nonprofit world are in. Payare not able to volunteers and cannot provide reliable service. How do we change that . We are working on a job training and job placement program. We cany, we can use train people. We can pay them to recover food, to process food. That money comes back not as profit, but goes back into the programs. We can get another Grocery Store on board, another restaurant. Another program we are working on in terms of restaurants started in brazil. It is similar to a program out of austin, texas. Inis encouraging consumers restaurants to have smaller portions. For example, you have a restaurant that signs on, and they can offer an entree that is about 2 3 of the size but the same price. The difference goes toward a local nonprofit working to end childhood hunger. These different tactics made to Work Together and we need to Work Together to be able to, when we have a client that comes in or an issue you know what . That is not what we do. ,et me tell you about lean pass and how they can help a large scale Grocery Store deal with waste in terms of production. You want to chime in . That is interesting technology. They are starting to be developed related to oxygen. Oxygen is the key factor affecting food. For it to age. There is one Company Called fresh paper and one called blue apple that have created products you can have in your refrigerator that you can put with your produce. It extends the shelf life anywhere from five days to up to three weeks. There are technologies that are now becoming developed. There are technologies that are coaching fruits and vegetables in a vegetablebased gel that extends the shelf life of them. There are other innovative practices that Forward Thinking Companies are using. We have a Company Called organic girl. You may have seen the product in the markets. It is an organic salad business. I have created in their own packaging some oxygen deprivation. It reduces the amount of oxidation that occurs in food. Aslso are focused on soon as it is picked in the morning, within 24 hours, that project is in your store. There are ways that even the growers can become much more efficient. It is truly economical for them to do this. For those who want to reduce food waste farmers hate seeing this food being thrown away. We all hate seeing the green mike in our refrigerator. There is a San Franciscobased company which is using interesting applications for consumers, forgiving recipes. When you have stuff that is aging, you can cut it up. You can make a sauce or a soup. Reduce the 23 figure, which is so significant. I think it is worth tensioning on this topic there is a lot of great writing on this. Food labels, expiration dates there is no uniformity and standard there. It is up to the food manufacturer what they put on there. That anchor may mean something or may not. Typically, it would signify what should be moved out of retail. It may have months over for duration life. Does anyone want to speak to innovation in that space and Consumer Education . To your first question, one of the things i can say as far as education get some teenagers on board. They will get out there and tell everybody what you are telling them, and make her parents do what i am telling them to do. They are very effective and persistent. They are super irritating when they get on their soapbox. That i havehings been trying to work on, as far as what do we do with all the food . For instance, i think you were talking about recipes for different things. We see things like bananas will come in. That and salad greens are constant. Once they look a certain way, people do not want them. It has nothing to do with taste or what you can do with the banana. It has only to do with the fact that it has got burned on it. Trying to educate people around aesthetics can be really difficult. I would say generational. Innovative in that space with these foods salad greens, i have not figured out what to do it. You have to eat them or compost them. That is what i do. With bananas, i have discovered different ways you can use them. Art of it is the reeducation process for me is for me as well. I am noticing i have to change the way i think about things in order to create something out of them. I am fine with eating brown bananas. I think they taste good myself. Have five cases are brown bananas, suddenly you hate them with a passion. I have probably eight different recipes that i have just figured out. Recipes, and there are none. I have the recipes, if you want them. Is notcation process just about educating other people. It is about educating ourselves as well. It is about understanding what we need to do. I think i just circumvented your whole question and went bananas. Rate, the education process really does start at home first. It starts with act with asking certain questions about what we will eat. These atrisk kids i work with these are from families where homes are broken. The mother might be in jail because she did something to the dad, or the dad might be in jail because he did something to the mom. Or they shot somebody they were pissed off at because they were drunk. These kids do not always eat that night. What they eat is often what i am bringing them from whole foods, or just donated to me. These are the kids that need food. I will go to the local high school where kids have money, and they do not need food so much. But when you talk to these different demographics, the kids who need food for who you think do not know anything actually are a lot more open to listening to what i have to say than the kids who have food. That blew me away. I did not expect kids who are educated, who come from good families, that they would not want to listen. I do not want to change their habits, because it is too hard. It is too hard to take something from your refrigerator that is going to keep your food from turning brown. It is hard to move your food from the back to the front. It is easier to just stick it in when you get it. That is the attitude a lot of these kids have. I was like, little punk. I went to the atrisk kids, and they listen to what i said, because nobody had said it to them before. There were not being inundated with media or their ipad or iphone, or their nanny or whatever. It would listen to what i said and would make a change. They would take the tomato they use in their households, as most of them are hispanic, and they would cut the brown spot off of it rather than throwing it away. As they started doing that, their mom started to do it. Made be their brother never will do it, but their grandma started to do it. Dad would not throw the tomato away, and would wait for mom to cut it. I know we are talking about cultural differences, but the fact is, behaviors started to change. I am small. I only had eight employees over this last year. I am cycling it through my Insurance Business to afford it. The fact of the matter is, i did see change. It is possible. The education process does require a lot of work and passion. We can figure out a way to clone my dna. Then, we will be able to do it. A topic for another time, perhaps. Retail is still a problem. This is where you deal with the consumer picking this issue. I know you are both addressing this with their respective operations. Question . Re economics if you drop the price low enough, people are happy to take it . Or create value where there was none, the distribution part of the supply chain . What do you see work, and what does not question mark we waste around 28 of the produce we buy at a supermarket. Produce makes up 10 of sales, but 15 of problems. If we were to cut down our produce waste to 14 , we would go from profit to loss. Right now tontial america. If we stop wasting food, the entire economy would go into hardier arrest. It would be like a longtime alcoholic going dry cold turkey. It would be catastrophic. Readpportunity if you danas report, 10 of freshwater, 20 of freshwater, eight percent of the energy, and 25 of the land. If we, as consumers, stop wasting money, supermarkets would be laying off people. We did not get into this touation overnight. We need restructure the american economy. It is a longterm process, but it has to be done because of the resources we are burning through. What we are trying to do here is invest in new sectors. You can recapture some of that energy if you do it right. It is tough, but you can do it. You can use some food to feed animals, to replace chemical fertilizers. That is a lot of displacement of existing investments and lobbying dollars. That it requires organization. The other thing is, we have come to look at hunger as a monolithic thing. People million hungry number is a result of answering the question, in the last year, did you feel hungry, or did you worry about your next meal is coming from . That creates people on the streets with longterm comorbidities, with people who just lost their job and will not get another one. What are the behaviors that lead to hunger and the behaviors that lead to waste . For example, Senior Citizens a lot of them are hungry and have poor nutritional outcomes, because when the spouse dies, they do not like to be or cook alone. And who does . There are programs of College Students going in, not just dropping off the meal, but sitting down and eating. You can do all sorts of things with social media to put people together. If you look at it simply as a logistics program, it is always going to boil down to a cultural problem. D. C. Central kitchen, starting retired marine corps, spent 30 years in the marine corps, i started running the greater chicago food depository, and brought it up to speed logistically. Change the face of the industry. Can have all the Freight Management systems. Ultimately, it comes down to culture. Build a new has to economy and a new culture. That is the goal. That is what you do. Essentiallysaying this is all about economics at some point. It is really hard for the farmer, for the retailer, to look at this and justify making investments and changing relatively entrenched industries to say, how can we make this more efficient . How can we make this more profitable for us . The key driver we are seeing is more of a moral issue. We want to do well. We want to look at this issue. No one wants to throw the food away. Originally our first customer was walmart. We took this idea to walmart to reduce food waste. The not going to quote numbers, but it is insanely high, the food they throw away each year. Everyore they measure piece of food that goes through their system, and they know what is happening with it. We gave them some solutions. What they ended up doing is realizing there was an opportunity for them to change their supply chain and look at their purchasing patterns and how they take certain of their products. And take it to distribution centers. They probably bought so much they will never have enough consumer demand, because they get so much at such great prices. Hold it there, and figure out producty can take that them donate that food. They are donating. The numbers are, once again, so large. They truly are interested in caring. They want to do this. It is going to start with his feelgood basis. The economics behind this are really important and really valuable. Not just where it is lost, but where there is true profit margin opportunity. As of the tools we are bringing forward, and the partners that have those tools. It shows there are really significant economics and we do not just have to accept the fact that we are going to throw away a certain amount of our food, whoever we are and wherever we are in the supply change. Supply chain. Walmart can tell if anyone has a leaky seal. They can read the temperature in any cooler. Most food banks cannot tell you where the trucks are. Everyone in the supply chain, 24 7, 365. Food banks are open monday through friday. They do not have the money. Omar can vary every food bank in produce every day of the week. Food banks are the problem. They do not have the resources to move that food. They should be in the composting business, so they are always the answer to problems. I should aggregate it someplace so you can get it in without using more gas than you generate. When walmart says do it, every walmart in the world would do it. The culture is solvable on the business end. It is the nonprofits, the charities, that do not have the iran nonprofits for years. How would you like to do it . At some point, the policy issue is not just food policy or tax benefit policy. Do you really give these people the resources to do what you say you are going to do . It is not just shoving food into a hopper. It is a real question. Do we want to make the investment it takes to do it the right way . A quick comment. We have multiple business articles, colleges and universities, health care, casinos, hotels the ones we have had the most challenging time with our the retail. You obviously have more exposure than i do. First of all, it was a concept of, waste is negligence. To jobre, it could lead insecurity. There are a lot of reasons. It all comes down to economics. They dont want to see the numbers. They did not want to have to create a solution. We are still struggling with it. We know there is a huge amount there. Depending on how big they are or how small they are, they are receptive. The bigger they get it is a thing here. They are exposing me to stuff i had not thought too. I thought psychology was not ready to see that in black and white. Stunning sudden things. I want to invite audience questions. Make your way to the microphone. I am going to ask one final question of the panelists, and request short answers. The European Union they have a common food waste policy across 27 different countries. Foodhave a target of 50 waste reduction and a 20 reduction of food chain inputs by 2020. That is an aggressive goal. On the heels of the least productive session of the u. S. Congress in history, is there something we can do on par with that, federal or state level food reduction targets . Or is there something people in the audience should be asking representatives to do to grease the wheels for your various goals . Is there something missing that the government could spur . As i mentioned before, in the state of california, there is actually legislation that is sector to dealte with organic waste, or a diversion from landfills by 2020. Really make people confront that. Interest in other places, where people are realizing there is an economic benefit to do it. We are starting to see that type of legislation in the United States. One thing i would say about europe as well is, the biogas the European Biogas Association or german Biogas Association they have digesters and are expecting that to increase to by 2020. They are putting a big emphasis on biogas. We are seeing that in california, and it is creeping up other places. There really will be movement in that direction. A section of the irs code needs to be changed to give a credit. That will spur a lot of movement. The federal Food Waste Reduction act is the most hypocritical thing you have ever read. Will requireators the contractor to take measures to reduce food waste and to recover food. They said the administrator shall in take financial responsibility for those efforts. If that were true, you guys would be able to find yourselves like that. Make some change. I already said it. Eens. He tt we launched a petition to the epa administrators. There was a project called the food too good to waste toolkit. It is aimed at municipalities, but expanding. Them to put their backing and funding behind this toolkit. There are people giving cooking lessons. There are Training Programs for people who are interested in spreading the word about food may food waste and what you can do with that. Go to our website and sign that petition, and help us get epa funding behind the toolkit. I am sorry to say there is not any optimism there. To become educated is the process. The more we become educated in understanding what we can do in our own personal life and personal homes, and how we can thegrate that. And for businesses, understand how it is truly an economic benefit for them, whether it is profit driven or marketing, branding, and feeling good about it. That is the approach we think is going to drive the change we need to see happen. On the not confident federal level, but i have a lot of confidence in the system, dealing with a lot of municipalities that are very accurate very active. They are putting bans on local organics in the landfill. Right now, it is very bottomup. I am very pleased with the level of specificity. We had the tax code cited over there. One of the things that i think is very important is how we frame this. We say, there are lots of problems with food waste. There are lots of problems everywhere. But there is not just a problem. There are opportunities now. Thatf us are in things now did not exist before. I am sure you are involved i